This sultry summer has brought Britain little to be cheerful about. With violent death stalking our cities and Jeremy Corbyn’s inglorious revolution threatening our future, a sickening sense of doom now hangs over the country. A year ago, the nation surprised itself by voting to regain independence from the European Union. The exhilaration that followed this shock to the system has dissipated in acrimony over Brexit and the election, while the Grenfell Tower fire, in which at least 79 died, and four major terrorist attacks, with a combined death toll of 35, caused even the Queen to ask for a minute’s silence at her birthday Trooping of the Colour, admitting that “it is difficult to escape a very sombre national mood” after “a succession of terrible tragedies”.

There were even echoes of the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in the calls on Theresa May to show more emotion in public after Grenfell Tower. Just as in 1998 the Queen was forced to return to Buckingham Palace in the midst of private grief, so the Prime Minister felt obliged to return to the scene of the fire. Though one of the clergy present at these private meetings testified that Mrs May did indeed shed tears while listening to their harrowing accounts, by then nobody cared about the truth. Her stiff upper lip in public could not compete in popularity with the touchy-feely Mr Corbyn.

There were fears, too, of a repetition of riots that swept across London and other cities in 2011. Violence flared in Kensington, when Leftist and Islamist agitators briefly occupied the Town Hall. They demanded obedience to Mr Corbyn’s call for empty luxury flats to be requisitioned, exaggerated the casualties in the fire and peddled conspiracy theories about a cover-up. Then there was the “Day of Rage” outside Parliament to coincide with the Queen’s Speech, organised by the Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary — a name that speaks for itself. The height of irresponsibility was John McDonnell’s call for a million people to take to the streets to force a change in government — as though Britain were a dictatorship in the Middle East or the former Soviet Union, where elections were rigged and only “people power” could oust a despot.

Some who did take to the streets were the rabble who marched down Regent Street on “Al Quds Day”, the annual hate-fest instituted by Ayatollah Khomeini; in 2012, Mr Corbyn attended this rally, where he spoke of his “friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah. This year Mr Corbyn’s friends not only waved the flags of these terrorist organisations, but claimed that the Grenfell Fire was the work of “Zionists”. Police turned a blind eye to this blood libel, as they do to Labour’s institutional anti-Semitism. So did the Mayor, Sadiq Khan.